Our Wacky World—9/15/2012

The entire world has been baffled by Clint Eastwood's speech at the RNC (right before Romney's acceptance speech). Leave it to film critic Roger Ebert to give the best review:

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"Two days later, not a word of Romney's acceptance speech has entered the public discourse. But Eastwood's dialog with a chair has entered forever into political legend, and it's amusing to read reports that his viewers from around the world were mystified. Iranian Facebook pages 'treated it with suspicious befuddlement,' an Atlantic blog reports, and in China the speech is being used to teach English on a web site. The headline says, 'Gelivable English Langauge Teaching: Exchange Cooperation Model Innovation,' says the Atlantic's Max Fisher, who adds: 'I don't know what that means, either.'"

The inevitable chorus of losers turn up in the comments. The first thing I thought of was how pissed they all were after the Eastwood's Superbowl commercial. Amnesia is an amazing thing to watch.

"They gave him a time limit and flashed a blinking red light that told him his time was up. He ignored both. The actor’s decision to use a chair as a prop was last-minute, and his own.... 'The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it,' a baffled senior aide said on Thursday night."

Then the Democrats had their convention. This review by Peggy Noonan reveals a great deal about how it was perceived by Beltway Insiders™:

"The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am too old to get pregnant old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one."

Shit

Really? This is the first time that, at your advanced age, you've ever seen it happen? It's never happened to, say, Republicans? Never? Not Once? The Tea Party perhaps? How about "intelligent" design?

And it's Sandra Fluke who's a narcissist. Right. This coming from a professional operative who lives to hear the sound of her own voice. Speaking of which, Sarah Palin didn't get mentioned at the RNC so she's complaining about being mentioned at the DNC:

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They have variations of the exact same product for a variety of other ills so if you're so unlucky as to not be suffering from M.S., you're not out of luck.

"So when he started talking about boobs I didn't really care. When he started showing me pictures of boobs of girls at the party that he had taken I thought 'okay that's weird whatever maybe he asked beforehand.' At some point he raised a concern about being Asian and women not wanting him cause of some stereotypical view of penis size, and I was like "most women will agree size doesn't matter" and went back to my phone... Then he grabbed my free wrist and put it on his crotch and asked 'Is this big enough?'"

"British police and medics whose failures contributed to the deaths of 96 soccer fans in the country's worst sports disaster unfairly blamed the dead for the 1989 tragedy and sought to cover up their actions, newly disclosed documents revealed Wednesday.

"The documents vindicated efforts by the victims' families, who had spent 23 years demanding a full accounting of the events at Hillsborough stadium that killed fans of the Liverpool soccer team. Most of the victims were crushed and suffocated in a standing-only section after they were herded there by police."

"Jeffrey LaPorta traveled more than a quarter of a mile through multiple storm sewer pipes, at times completely submerged water, before finding enough breathing room to await rescue. He was eventually pulled out of the sewer in less than an hour, with only scrapes and bruises."

"A Northern California mixed-martial artist accused of ripping out his friend's heart and removing his tongue while the two were on hallucinogenic drugs has pleaded guilty to murder and mayhem charges."

"A debate continues about how much damage will ultimately result from the ill-conceived use of vaccinators by the CIA. Pakistan's leading vaccine expert, Zulfiqar Bhutta, has tried to remain optimistic about polio elimination in Pakistan. And the World Health Organization, whose polio campaign in Nigeria encountered many years of opposition from religious fundamentalists, remains uncertain about just how long the setback in Pakistan will last and whether it will spread to other countries."

"Nelson knew that she had exceeded the limits of her expertise and that Maine needed advice from another practitioner, but she did not appropriately communicate that or discontinue her treatment, and she gave Maine information which accentuated the woman's fear of conventional treatment."

"A Sydney doctor who is a member of the Exclusive Brethren Christian sect has been banned from practising as a GP after he prescribed chemical castration to a young man who sought a ''cure'' for homosexuality."

"The Todd Akin thing was so blown out of proportion -- it's a joke," Jackson said at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., when interviewed for my SiriusXM OutQ radio program. "How many times do people get pregnant from rape? It's point zero zero one percent. It's a joke. I read lots of articles. I know people, because I'm 53. I've know a lot of people, and I've actually never known anyone who got pregnant from being raped."